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The Science of the Andamans and the Sign of the Four

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The Science of the Andamans and the Sign of the Four THE SCIENCE OF THE ANDAMANS AND THE SIGN OF THE FOUR The distorted racial hierarChy of British imperial anthropology [ReCeived February 11th 2019; accepted January 5th 2020 – DOI: 10.21463/shima.14.2.14] Arup K. Chatterjee O.P. Jindal Global University, Haryana, India <[email protected]> ABSTRACT: This artiCle examines the diChotomous relationship between racial hierarChies effeCted by imperial sCience, on the one hand, and the subversive potential of the sCientifiC knowledge gleaned from the Andaman Islands, on the other, in ViCtorian Britain. Knowledge about the Andaman Islands and its ‘savage’ aboriginal tribes had been etChed onto British ConsCiousness sinCe the establishment of Britain’s naval base in Greater Andaman (present-day Port Blair), in 1789, followed by a Century of anthropologiCal, ethnologiCal, zoologiCal and linguistiC and explorations into the Andamanese people. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four began being serialised in 1890, a fantastiCal knowledge of manners and physiognomy of the Andamanese was remarkably familiar to London, through Colonial histories, a wide array of photographs in British periodiCals, and iconic Clay sCulptures of the aboriginals displayed at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886. While British imperialism wanted to projeCt its inexhaustible sCientifiC and teChnoCratiC powers Counterpoising them against the untameable and (supposedly) prehistoriC life of the Andaman Islands, The Sign of the Four ruptured that disCourse. I argue that, in the CharaCter of the little Andamanese “hell-hound,” Tonga, Doyle presents an example of the failure of imperial sCientifiC prowess to appropriate the savage identity into its raCial and hierarChical disCourse. Within the seemingly sCarCe presenCe of India in the world of SherloCk Holmes, it is deeply Consequential that Doyle seleCted the Andaman Islands as a key loCation for the origin of his detective plot, as the home of the subaltern Tonga, who pre-empts the spectrality of the hound—a manifestation of imperial guilt and paniC—to Come later in The Hound of the Baskervilles. KEYWORDS: SherloCk Holmes; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four; Andaman; India; London; Tonga; Colonial and Indian Exhibition -------- In 1885 – a year before the Colonial and Indian Exhibition was held at South Kensington and five years before the serialisation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four in the Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine – the Bulletin of the Essex Institute published exCerpts from Ancient and Modern Methods of Arrow-Release (1883), written by Edward Sylvester Morse, direCtor of the Peabody ACademy of SCienCe. Inter alia, Morse disCussed Andamanese arrow-releasing praCtiCes. One of his primary sources was the renowned anthropologist and photographer, Edward Horace Man, whose book, The Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (1880), was one of the sCores of ViCtorian anthropologiCal and ethnographiC acCounts of the Andaman arChipelago. One of Man’s ______________________________________________ Shima <www.shimajournal.org> ISSN: 1834-6057 Chatterjee: Andaman Islands/ Sign of the Four predeCessors, FrederiC John Mouat, had written in his Adventures and Researches Among the Andaman Islanders (1863) of the ambuscades and Clouds of the poisoned arrows that many Britons had perished from or been mortally wounded by in the arChipelago (Figure 1). Figure 1 - Map of Andaman and NiCobar Islands and position in Bay of Bengal (Google Maps, 2020) The Battle of Aberdeen on the Andaman Islands, fought in 1859, was a wonderfully hushed affair in ViCtorian ConsCiousness. The battle was fought by the Andamanese tribe Jarawa, with bow-and-arrows, against heavy British musketry. Although the tribe was woefully outnumbered and outsmarted by British weaponry, MauriCe Vidal Portman’s A History of Our Relations with the Andamanese (1899), one of the rare accounts of the battle, would somewhat valourise the shooting skills of the Andamanese bowmen (cf. Figures 2 and 3). “It seems to require long praCtiCe and skill of touCh,” he remarked, “to use the bow and arrow as the Andamanese Can use them” (ibid: 391) Portman’s acCount made no mention of poisoned arrows, only lethally poisonous vipers. Man, who did refer to Portman’s acCount on a few ocCasions, disagreed emphatiCally with his predeCessor on the question of poisoned arrows: “no evidenCe is forthComing to show that they ever applied poison to their arrow or spear-heads – in faCt the only poison known to them appears to be Nux vomica,” or strychnine (ibid: 138-39). Man’s ConClusion was that Mouat had asCribed to the Andamanese “more intelligenCe on this point than they possess” (ibid). Besides these, there were several acCounts, whiCh, while making anthropologiCal, ethnographiC and linguistiC observations _______________________________ Shima Volume 14 Number 2 2020 - 215 - Chatterjee: Andaman Islands/ Sign of the Four on the Andamanese, plaCed them at the nethermost sCale of human evolution—the very state of nature at is most savage, unteachable and untameable.1 Figure 2 - (Detail from) “A Group of Andaman Islanders” (Mouat, 1863: vi). 1 While this paper refers to several qualities of Andamanese tribes and the character from The Sign of the Four, Tonga, in strongly worded raCial terms suCh as ‘savage’, ‘hound’, ‘beast’, and similar, these are not to be taken as attitudes of the paper towards a raCe or raCes of people, but are instead meant for the sole purpose of emphasising ViCtorian perceptions of the Andamanese, and foreign tribes in general, that British anthropology propagated. This paper strongly opposes all suCh raCialist notions. _______________________________ Shima Volume 14 Number 2 2020 - 216 - Chatterjee: Andaman Islands/ Sign of the Four Figure 3 - “Andaman Islanders and Implements” (Mouat, 1863: 314). It is no mystery whiCh of these inspired Doyle to sketch the CharaCter of the fiendish Andamanese, Tonga, in The Sign of the Four. “It was that little hell-hound Tonga who shot one of his Cursed darts into him,” says Jonathan Small, the Criminal mastermind behind the plan to retrieve the stolen Agra Treasure (1890: 203). The man whom Tonga shoots dead, mistakenly, is Bartholomew Sholto, the elder son of the retired Indian army offiCer, Major John Sholto. The instrument of murder was a most unlikely blow-pipe, with whiCh Tonga was used to shooting thorn-sized poisoned darts that left almost no mark on the mortal flesh of its viCtims save a “tiny speCk of blood” at the point of ContaCt (170). 21st Century pharmaCology and toxiCology are still speCulating whether the bizarre poisonous elements in Doyle’s œuvre – such as the Devil’s Foot (radix pedis diabolic) from the eponymous adventure published in 1910 – were real or fiCtional. It is not inapposite to speculate, in the same vein, what might have been the motivations behind Mouat and Doyle Crediting the Andamanese with greater toxiCologiCal wisdom than they otherwise seemed to possess according to mainstream imperial science. The world of Sherlock Holmes is Considered to be devoid of a living and breathing India (Thompson, 1993: 69-73). Alongside that strategic absence of the Raj, The Sign of the Four has been interpreted as a perpetuation of the ‘savage’ representations of the Andamanese people, allying with dominant anthropologiCal, ethnologiCal, zoologiCal, linguistiC and toxiCologiCal investigations of the ViCtorian mind into the life of the Andaman Islands (Mehta, 1995: 639; Frank, 1996: 66; McBratney, 2005: 155). This paper Challenges suCh a notion through evidence from the novel, and argues that Doyle, with his Counterintuitive insight into Andamanese history, understood the inherent and unControllable speCtrality of the imperial projeCt. The Sign of the Four, like its predeCessor The Moonstone (1868), is an expression of the dangerously inappropriate manifestations of imperial sCienCe and what Ian DunCan has Called, “imperialist paniC” (1994). Critiquing ViCtorian anthropology and ethnography, Gyan Prakash has observed that British imperial sCienCe, in its mature _______________________________ Shima Volume 14 Number 2 2020 - 217 - Chatterjee: Andaman Islands/ Sign of the Four stages, ran rife with the risk of going “native,” or being used by Indians as a tool of self- representation and self-determination, to oppose their own objeCtifiCation within Colonial disCourses of raCial hierarChy (1992). In examining 20th Century records and Contemporary CritiCism, in the first two sections I shall explore the history of the Andaman Islands, as reCorded in Victorian ConsCiousness, until the time of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, marking the inConsistenCies in the disCourse of raCial hierarChy that imperial sCienCe sought in objeCtifying the islands’ aboriginal tribes. The latter half of the essay will reflect on the possible sourCes of Andamanese history that Caused Doyle, and his Creation Holmes, to ConCeive and perCeive the CharaCter of Tonga – as a face of a devil, an Indian, an Andamanese and a dangerous equal. I finally argue that the poisoned darts used by Tonga were neither necessarily real nor fiCtional – neither entirely of Andamanese Craft nor English imagination – but a metaphor of the boomeranging of imperial sCienCe, or, more perilously, an alien sCienCe that Could beCome unControllable to those milling “loungers and idlers of the Empire” (Doyle, 1982: 3) whom the progress of imperialism had attraCted into London and its suburbs. The Sign of the Four – and subsequently The Hound of the Baskervilles
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